Trash, class, and free cigarettes

August 26, 2018 8:02 AM

Many of the show’s guests came from the Tri-State area of Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky, she told me, and they had had success with hiring PAs from that area. ... In short, the guests were my people, and I would be able to communicate with them effectively. I knew their ways. They would trust me, and I would betray them, as I had been betraying them for years.

At the AV Club, Katie Rife recalls her time working on the Jerry Springer Show.
posted by Johnny Assay (17 comments total)

Color me surprised. I thought this show had been off the air for 15 years at least.
posted by slkinsey at 8:10 AM on August 26, 2018 [5 favorites]

One of my high school teachers (A 22-year old in her first gig, visibly barely older than the high school seniors) told us about the time she and two friends scripted out a love-triangle drama for themselves and pitched it, successfully, to the show. She said it was ridiculous and fun and yeah, that episode still came up in reruns sometimes. I stopped wondering about the veracity of the show at that point, which would have been just about when this woman was starting her job there.
posted by restless_nomad at 8:20 AM on August 26, 2018 [2 favorites]

Does anyone else cackle when they remember that Steve Wilkos got his own "Jerry Springer" show because the exects realized he was the reason people were tuning in, but didn't realize they weren't tuning in to see him sit in a chair and talk to teenage girls?

Why the hell do I know this shit?
posted by East14thTaco at 8:26 AM on August 26, 2018 [5 favorites]

An ex-boyfriend of a friend of mine went on a talk show -- I think it was the Sally Jessy Raphael show -- once with his then girlfriend as teenagers. They'd cooked up a story about their planning to get married in the near future because they believed they had found twoo wuv, though they had no intention of getting married. In return, they got a free trip to whatever city the show taped in, a few nights' stay in a nice hotel, the fun of appearing on television, and the amusement of listening to a disapproving studio audience try to talk them out of marrying so young. The show's producers didn't know they were fabricating the whole story. I should think a pretty high proportion of such shows' guests were doing something similar.
posted by orange swan at 8:49 AM on August 26, 2018 [14 favorites]

I think that the class angle here is the real story.
posted by k8t at 9:05 AM on August 26, 2018 [8 favorites]

If you were broke in the midwest and wanted a short vacation in the windy city, hey, win win.

The pushing smokes part made me sad but just normal for the time.
posted by sammyo at 9:08 AM on August 26, 2018 [1 favorite]

Orange Swan: Perhaps our friends were on the same episode! The girl who sat behind me in Grade 12 English appeared on a very similar episode with her boyfriend (who she claimed was her fiancé).

When she returned from taping, she said that an audience member had questioned why one of the young couples, who claimed they were married, weren't wearing rings. At the commercial break, the producer rushed over to question that couple and they were pulled off the set for the rest of the show. I always appreciated the layers of performance in this story: the guests pretending they were the characters they were playing, the producers pretending they believed the guests, the audience believing/ not believing and playing 'gotcha!'...
posted by Sauter Vaguely at 9:12 AM on August 26, 2018 [1 favorite]

Katie Rife is generally one of my favorite AV Club writers, and this part really rang true:

This fascination with the dark mirror image of my own upbringing continued into college, where I gleefully joined kids from wealthy suburbs in making fun of the “trailer trash” we saw on Springer. This performative contempt masked a deep insecurity: “Maybe they won’t know I’m here on scholarship,” I thought. “Maybe they won’t smell my dishwashing job on my clothes.”

My clique (well, the one that I sort of hung around the edges of) weren't from wealthy suburbs, but they had the same sort of easy contempt for the tackier aspects of American culture that young people who aspire to coolness everywhere possess. And, if I'd graduated from college several years later, I would have jumped at a chance to be a PA on Springer. Instead, I spent the years between college and grad school in that sort of minimum wage milieu, and got a different perspective.
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:23 AM on August 26, 2018 [5 favorites]

The producer on the phone was interested in my background—not my telecommunications background, which was minimal (I had taken a few courses in school, as part of a concentration in film) but my origins in Cincinnati. Many of the show’s guests came from the Tri-State area of Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky, she told me, and they had had success with hiring PAs from that area. I seemed smart, so she wanted to know if I was interested in a job. In short, the guests were my people, and I would be able to communicate with them effectively. I knew their ways. They would trust me, and I would betray them, as I had been betraying them for years.

Secrets to success.
posted by Brian B. at 9:39 AM on August 26, 2018 [3 favorites]

Many of the show’s guests came from the Tri-State area of Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky...

This explains a lot.
While I never watched the show, on those rare occasions when I did happen across it, I always thought the guests seemed eerily (scarily?)...familiar. As in "a couple of blocks over" familiar.
posted by Thorzdad at 9:46 AM on August 26, 2018 [2 favorites]

I also know people who went on that show based on lies. Between them and this thread, I’m guessing that at least 50% of their guests were making it up to have a little fun for free.
posted by aramaic at 10:11 AM on August 26, 2018 [1 favorite]

Now that Jerry’s gone, the last tabloid talk show hosts standing are Maury Povich, who’s been telling people whether they’re the father or not on Maury since 1991, and Steve Wilkos, an ex-Chicago cop and Springer’s former head of security who spun his celebrity into his own daytime TV trash-fest in 2007.

...which ignores the fact that this shit has now metastasised to other countries.
posted by flabdablet at 10:12 AM on August 26, 2018

What's weird is that while Springer's guests were often actors and the atmosphere was a circus, Steve Wilkos's guests appear to be real people with real trauma. I can't imagine amateurs could fake the tears Wilkos's guest shed. And Wilkos hosts with the seriousness of a cop doing field interviews.

Totally different tone between the two shows. It's like if Reno 911 or Brooklyn 99 had a spinoff that was a Law & Order style drama.

I also want to mention how smart Oprah was to pivot her show in a more positive direction at the time. It left her the last host standing after all these other shows fell trying to chase Jerry.
posted by riruro at 10:47 AM on August 26, 2018 [2 favorites]

Damn, I think my Springer cast member friend was not such a farce. From a different place and while exaggerated would not be far from true.

I still really really really want to see that episode, but there's no way I'm sifting through to find it. It would be a bit pre-1998-ish.

She turned out OK I think... but I sorta liked her mohawk a bit better... :)

JSTR
posted by zengargoyle at 12:18 PM on August 26, 2018

Hard to believe anyone could watch more than five minutes of that show and not realize they were worse off than the people they were watching.
posted by notreally at 4:30 PM on August 26, 2018

Her account sounded so much like the plot of Unreal that I checked to see if the author had a hand in the show (no).
posted by Beardman at 7:38 PM on August 26, 2018 [1 favorite]

The infamous Jerry Springer “Klanfrontation” fight.
posted by gucci mane at 11:10 AM on August 27, 2018